Ed McBain - The House That Jack Built

He was gone for about five minutes.

When he came back, he said, “Go right on in.”

“Thank you,” Matthew said.

He went to the door, opened it, and stepped into a small office.

The man behind the desk weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. The man behind the desk had blond hair cut in the style of a Roman emperor, ringlets curling on his forehead and over his ears. The man behind the desk was wearing a shirt open to his waist. A gold medallion hung on his chest. The man behind the desk had rings on all his fingers. His fingernails were painted a screaming scarlet.

The man behind the desk was as gay as a tulip.

“Mrs. Summerville! It’s me! Katie!”

On the shelf above Toots’s head, the reels on the tape recorder began whirring, activated by the woman’s voice.

Good, it works, she thought.

“Mrs. Summerville? Are you here?”

Silence.

The housekeeper, she thought.

Terrific.

She’ll be here all day cleaning.

So how do I get out of this closet?

“Mr. Holden?” Matthew said.

Holden rose from behind his desk. Fifty — two or — three years old, big as a Buddha, he waddled toward Matthew, wide trousers flapping, sandals slapping on the wooden floor, pudgy hand extended, welcoming smile on his face.

“Mr. Hope,” he said, “a pleasure.”

Matthew took his hand. A moist, flabby handshake.

“Mr. Holden, I’m representing a man named Ralph Parrish, who’s…”

“Yes, I know. I read all about it in the papers. Am I involved somehow?”

A flirtatiously impish look that managed to convey two separate reactions:

Me? Involved in a murder?” How absurd!

But at the same time:

Me? Involved in a murder? How exciting!

“Are you?” Matthew asked.

“Well, I would hardly think so. Then again, here you are. And I have to wonder why.”

“Mr. Holden, some six years ago…”

“Oh dear, that ,” Holden said, and waved it away with one pudgy hand.

“Your abrupt dismissal from the company…”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently.

“Your subsequent suit for libel…”

“And defamation,” Holden said.

“Which was settled out of court.”

“Well, of course. For five hundred thou, enough to buy me a nice marina, thank you. La Cerveza Grande knew she was in trouble, making such absurd claims to the press. I’d have turned that brewery into a parking lot if she hadn’t settled.”

“By La Cerveza Grande …”

“The Big Beer , as our beloved CEO was familiarly known. Or, alternately, in straightforward English, the Blonde Bitch. Elise Brechtmann.”

“Who fired you.”

“Indeed.”

“Why?”

“The real reason or the good reason?”

“Both, if you will.”

“Why should I tell you anything at all?”

“You don’t have to. But I can always ask for…”

“Yes, yes, depositions, how boring.”

“They are.”

“How well I know,” Holden said, and sighed. “There were more damn depositions…” He sighed again. “She said I was stealing from the company. That was the good reason for firing me.”

“Stealing what?”

“What does one steal, Mr. Hope? Paper clips? Rubber bands? Come now. Money , of course. Huge sums of money.”

“How?”

“The brewing of beer doesn’t take very many people, you know. Twenty men on the day shift, fifteen on the afternoon shift, and fifteen on the midnight shift. Plus two supervisors and a general foreman on each shift. Forty, forty-five people tops — to turn out two million barrels of beer annually. That is what one might call low overhead, hmmm? At least insofar as labor is concerned.”

“I would say so, yes. What does that have to do with…?”

“Management is something else. By the time I started working for Brechtmann, there were seven breweries all over the country, with local management teams for each brew en. I was purchasing agent down here. Which is what caused all the brouhaha. Would you like a beer?”

“Thank you, no.”

“I’ll have one, if you don’t mind.” Holden said, and moved to a refrigerator across the room. Trousers as wide as pajama bottoms, flapping as he walked. He opened the refrigerator door. “Developed a taste for it while I was working for Brechtmann. Comes in handy when one deals with rough trade.” he said, and took a can out of the refrigerator. He closed the door, popped the can, tilted it to his mouth, drank. “I adore the foam,” he said.

Matthew said nothing.

“Are you married?” Holden asked him.

“Divorced.”

“Gay?”

“Straight.”

“Pity,” Holden said. “Where were we?”

“You were purchasing agent for…”

“Yes. And the purchasing agent in a brewery is responsible for purchasing the ingredients that go into making beer.”

“Naturally.”

“Of course. And the chief ingredients that go into making beer are malt, hops, and either rice or corn.”

“Uh-huh,” Matthew said.

“Do you know what malt is?”

“No.”

“Or hops?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Hardly anyone does. Hops are the dried ripe flowers of the hop plant, which is a sort of twining vine. They contain a bitter, aromatic oil. While I was working for Brechtmann, I bought my hops from Washington, Idaho, Oregon, even Poland and Czechoslovakia. It’s the mixture of different hops in various quantities that give different beers their distinctive flavors. The recipe for Golden Girl Beer was a secret. I knew that secret because I knew which hops I was buying and in what quantities.”

He stole the secret, Matthew thought. That’s why she fired him. He stole the secret recipe and sold it to Anheuser-Busch or Pabst or Miller…

“I didn’t steal the secret, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Holden said. “I didn’t steal anything , as a matter of fact.”

“But Elise Brechtmann claimed you did.”

“Well, of course!” Eyebrows rocketing onto his forehead. “What else would one expect from a bitch of her magnitude?”

“Claimed you stole huge sums of money from her, isn’t that what you said?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“The malt.”

“I’m sorry, what…?”

“The crux of the matter. It was her claim, you see, that I was eating the company’s malt — so to speak.”

“I still don’t know what malt is.”

“Brewer’s malt. Or barley malt, take your choice, they’re both the same thing. Essential to the brewing process. Steeped from raw barley, I won’t go into the details because they’re too tiresome, really. Suffice it to say that without barley malt, there ain’t no beer, Mr. Hope. So now we get to the basis of La Cerveza Grande’s charge.”

“Which was?”

“Patience, Mr. Hope,” Holden said, and sighed. He sipped at his beer. He looked at the can. “There was a time,” he said, “when I detested the aroma of malt. Ah, well.” He took another sip of beer . “When I was working for Brechtmann,” he said, “we owned malthouses that supplied thirty percent of our malt needs. But thirty percent wasn’t a hundred percent, and so I had to go to outside maltsters to buy the other seventy percent we needed. You have to understand how much malt we used , Mr. Hope, and how-much it cost us.”

“How much did you use?”

“To brew the two million barrels of beer we shipped each year, we needed sixty-three million pounds of malt.”

“That is a lot of malt,” Matthew said.

“Indeed,” Holden said.

“And what did all that malt cost you?”

“Prices per bushel change all the time,” Holden said. “But back in 1981 I’d say we were spending something like five million dollars annually for the malt we were getting from outside sources.”